They were accustomed by now to turning their lives upside down, working by night and sleeping by day. Most of them could sleep anywhere - sitting in a jeep, propped against a tree, even standing up sometimes. By mid-afternoon the men were roused. They packed and stowed their kit and had a big meal. Night fell. They hitched up the guns. Graham watched their faces. Tension and excitement there - and determination and assurance. For the first time they were taking part in one of the great operations of history. No side-show this! Monty himself had given them the call to battle: 'Over the Rhine then, let us go.' And they knew now that the mountain gunners had been awarded a vital role - close support for the 1st Commando Brigade, whose task it was to capture Wesel, tearing a great gash in the German defences through which other forces could pass.
Two days earlier Paul had called the officers together, shown them how the commandos planned the capture. No direct attack where the enemy was prepared - round by the back door instead. Their commander, Brigadier Mills-Roberts, had exploited the method brilliantly in Normandy - likened it to the way General Wolfe had scaled the Heights of Abraham with his army at Quebec. This time their 'Heights of Abraham' would be some mud flats a mile and a half below the town. A few slit trenches covered them, but these would be swamped by gunfire and the bridgehead secured.
While the rest of the force was landing, Wesel would be attacked once more by a formation of heavy bombers, and then the fifteen hundred men would disappear into the night. They had now perfected a system for moving a large body of men at high speed across country at night, and Paul and the other Forward Observation parties had practised it. The secret was a great roll of white minefield tape, four inches wide. Near the front two men unwound the tape from a giant spool: behind them, men followed in single file at the double, a great snake slithering through the night, the whole force swallowed up inside twenty minutes.
'They go lickety-split, I can tell you,' Paul added. 'Lucky we're all fit with the weights we have to carry.' They were carrying those weights because at all costs they must keep contact with the guns. The usual man-pack radio, the no. 68 set, proved too often unreliable. In its place they were taking the more powerful, but much heavier, no. 22 set, designed to be carried in vehicles. How to take it cross-country? They tried using a stretcher, as with a wounded man. No good! It was impossible to keep up the pace over rough country. They tried another tack, screwed set and aerial onto a plywood base and fitted the whole onto an Everest Carrier.
Pity the poor bloke who had to carry it! With the rest of his kit he had a load of 90 lbs. Linked to him came a second signaller, carrying 12-volt batteries and wearing earphones - this way they could send and receive signals on the move. Other signallers carried spare batteries, a smaller radio set, telephones and assault cable, rations for 24 hours. All had a Sten gun and four magazines. Carrying these loads they practised embarking in assault boats, landing from assault boats, moving across country by night at commando pace. 'We're confident.' Paul concluded, 'that we can go wherever the commandos go, and call down fire whenever it's needed. And I know we can count on you folk at the gun-end to give us that fire. Good luck everybody, and good shooting!'
So they knew what depended on them as they brought their guns up through the night. Dark figures strained to manhandle guns to the pits - no vehicle tracks must show. Well before dawn Graham moved round the guns for a final tour of inspection. No problems: everything prepared. 'Fox Troop Ready', he reported. Everybody tired now, happy enough to lie low like Brer Fox during the hours of daylight. Orders were strict: no movement of any kind on the gun-position until the attack started in the evening. Before dawn broke there was steady traffic to and from the latrines. For the rest of the day a large can in the corner of each dug-out served as urinal. From time to time a primus hissed, tea was brewed and food was eaten, but for most of the day men lay in their holes and slept. Nobody could tell how long the battle for Wesel would last. Nobody knew when they would sleep again.
There was little sleep in the Command Post - looking now like a busy office sunk below the soil. George's battery lighting-set was in full swing with Tilly pressure-lamps as stand-by. On one wall was fixed a large-scale plan of Wesel, coloured pins marking targets already coded and plotted. At the artillery-board Lance-Bombardier Waterman plotted new targets as they came in over the phone - air-photographs were still disclosing newly sited flak-guns and freshly-dug positions. At one corner of the table Gover was completing fire-programmes for each of the four guns, the four piles steadily growing.
No panic! The mountain gunners would be bystanders during the early stages of the attack, while bombers 'softened up' Wesel, and medium and heavy artillery attacked enemy gun-positions. They would still be standing-by while six field regiments fired a creeping barrage to support the commando landing. But then they would come into their own, with precision firing onto targets along the line of advance. Gradually those targets moved closer to Wesel, giving cover to the flanks as the commandos, following that thin white line through the darkness, formed up for the final assault.
'Fox Troop Ready.' Gun-teams alert: fire-programmes all completed and checked. Grabbing a sandwich and a mug of tea, Graham clambered half way up the dugout steps for a breath of air. Not a sound from the gun position. Like a coiled-up spring waiting for release. In the distance the crack of anti-aircraft guns, chasing off some German intruder. His eyes blinked in the sunlight and the air felt soft and warm. At last, after all that snow and rain and mud, spring had come.
Patches of bright yellow caught his eye - those tubs of daffodils by the crossing-keeper's house. Tokens of sanity among all this savagery - Shakespeare's daffodils that took the winds of March with beauty! March the 23rd today: punctual, those daffodils, in spite of that bitter winter. A distant drone caught his ear and he glanced at his watch. Others were punctual too. The drone became a roar of aircraft engines overhead. The sky was filled with Lancaster bombers, and Wesel was blotted out with flame and dust and smoke. Operation Plunder, the crossing of the Rhine, had started.
